Piku Mama, a brotherly figure, had a profoundly emotional impact on a teenage Arin, much like Rajveer, his steadfast and cherished childhood friend, shaped their formative years together at Trishul Park in the mid-1980s.
Arin still remembers the desiderius feeling of being blessed by something of which Piku Mama himself and, by logical extension, the Saha household were the fascinating source of that penultimate chapter, especially that which spanned nearly one full year in his formative teen years, and hence the writing of this singular reflective journal reminiscing the fine-arts-loving, generous, and creative gentleman of the latter half of the 1980s.
Oh, so much time has passed since then… Almost far-fetched, yet inherently fixed and finalized in its all-too-liquid continuous avatar, hinging on nothing from the past stories except being free-flowing in its tenaciously single-minded escape onwards and forwards, never backwards, into the unforeseeable future, come what may. No one knows what that is supposed to mean in the timeless, older-than-old galactic roll of the universe of matter and energy, in the cold outer dark of the great wandering space—a far-flung astronomical rock, its species frozen in curious wonder for a brief period of time.
Earth is a mere speck of that cosmic, orbital dusty trap as we know it, and all that, um, jazz-less jazz completing its sphere. And yet it must be the time, after time, after time.
--∞--
Ever since Piku Mama and the Sahas have left, time’s march forward meant the near-total abandonment of its earlier era was well-nigh over, and so nothing was going to remain the same. Only a spartan little of that sweet old era, though spanning a year, can be made available as ‘emotional fodder’ for Arin, cry-baby that he is for such a, according to some, vacant thing as a nostalgic memory: that beauty of old you remember and miss every time you think about it. No one tends to confess much because to give it a name is to tell the world. But for Arin, it is offered only to fulfil his nostalgic need to relive the good old days, which bloom in a continual fragrance, time after time, one era after another, in his heart, as it always brings him nothing but… peace. Other than that, nothing could be provided except as consolatory upkeep for those memorable commemorations he wholeheartedly accommodates deep within his heart.
Arin, however, put aside such one-sided, unfair, mothballing stagnancy on Time’s part that it could pose for him what he thought an intractable belligerence that couldn’t be tackled, forget appeasing it. He mournfully understood when to let go when it mattered, when the heart-wrenching ache of nostalgia struck him with a realization so stark that those amazing days he spent with the Saha family were all gone too soon, just within a year before Piku Mama faded into distant memory of the last year. He never meant to reconcile with the fact of their, if you like, permanent absence, which, he, only much later, had to force himself to believe that they would never really come back to Trishul Park. Say, on ‘reverse posting’ of some kind, and time moved forward, not backward, no matter what you pray to (or for) in life: strive for it to stop or heave a sigh of relief if it ever did, or whatever else you could invoke to leave behind its tell-all trail. And as time passed unceasingly, the past continually fell back from the future, he slowly let go of his passionate hold on that quiet but grim realism, which at long last evanesced into an ocean full of hope and longing, never trusting to leave anything for anything else, but to the inevitable destiny that life is entirely intertwined with: Time. Time heals, they say, but did it really? Nearly forty years have passed now; oh boy, it’s been such a long time already. Sad to say, after their leaving, life changed forever. It felt vastly different as childhood gave way to adulthood. Arin entered the senior secondary academic year a year later, and Piku Mama and Rajveer, his well-beloved close companions of that era, became everlasting icons, but retreated far away into an eternal past never to return. Things changed, as Time itself changed a great deal more strikingly than he realized. And the reality is—taking into account his past and recent experiences and newly forming, yet inchoate, nostalgic emotions a teenager like him could behold unvaryingly towards Rajveer (Raju) and Piku Mama both; his crossing from not knowing to knowing emerged little by little as his teenage life turned a different corner in 1988—nothing ever remained the same again.
Today his mind wanders to the one-year sojourn of Piku Mama in the great environs of Trishul Park, where Arin grew up. He still can’t have enough of that old era gone by, indelibly impressed on his mind. And every so often Raju (Rajveer), his childhood bestie, dawns on his mind and heart, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer, each passing day as a sweetly plaintive remembrance of a childhood friend who left the Trishul Park wonderland way back in 1988, never to see him again. Some memories never fade, and time goes on unheeded.
And at that turning point in Arin’s life, which rather turned up—it had to anyhow—a little too early, a shift in time that is constant in an ever-changing world, unannounced and directly withdrew into an old-world anonymity that the present will never feel beholden for reaching out to. Except all that lives in one’s ingrained sense of memories, indelible, of course, is that the heart does go on regardless of time and place.
Consequently, as life continued through quiet moments like these, the collective essence of the charming good old days of the Saha family—where Piku Mama had been an intrinsic part and parcel of the way of life as it once was, at that well-loved, frequently-visited, unsurpassable 19/4, Trishul Park dormitory of the ‘80s—got turned around in the mist of memory daydreaming the sweet old time of yesterdays, impermanent as it is for it will soon change to tomorrow, and then it seemed all good things have gone away leaving Arin quietly repentant for what could have been in a world that changed too dramatically and drastically for him to hold on to the loving days he was deeply smitten with, holding aloft a sense a longing and belonging in the familiar ‘dormitory of departures’ that eventually Trishul Park had come to be known as, irremediable in the distant shadows of an unreachable past no one, it seems, likes to reminisce about—only a great lone feeling of past echoes of missed relations had shaped Arin’s conscience to leave that very door ajar for all time to come.
The 1986-87 year had been deeply engrossed in Arin’s heart’s inner chamber of longing and belonging to all those beautiful days that have passed into bittersweet oblivion, into historical extinction. That year, for him, had never been emotionally absent despite all these decades of silently brooding about it while trying to figure out the long hours of personal remembrances of friends and family Arin had lost over the years—it seemed to Arin, in an oncoming epoch of obscurity. But that magical year, deep-rooted as it is in its emotional constancy, in his sense of time and place, will never fade, never diminish with time. (That even writing this story can perhaps be proof enough that the memory of Piku Mama of that year endures, and it will in this lifetime).
Speaking on an optimistic note, Arin—in the endlessly long absence of Piku Mama, Raja, and Mr. and Mrs. Saha, not to forget their favoured pets, Roxy, Mithu Pakhi, and Binky bunny—is presumably the only moonstruck romantic of that old era who still enjoys or wants to remember the good old days. Maybe because he lives forward but understands backward, and can’t stop writing or talking about it, as if chronically dipped in the precious joys of melancholy he can’t have enough of; in fact, the more, the merrier. That’s certainly like being a moonstruck romantic. Make of that what you will.
--∞--
Alas, growing up in the eighties, life was so full of fun, simple, and unforgettable that largely untethered, tactile experiences, exploring outdoors, overshadowed the 1990s that came afterwards, while the 2000s and the years after kept up being—many superfluous specialties besides—unfavourably vain, offering no sensible comfort or escapism for the aching heart that wants to heal all wounds nostalgically and meaningfully. All those years of the ‘80s still linger like a dreamy aroma that refuses to wane in Arin’s mind, and those places he still longs to visit. But those years, which would soon turn into decades, pointed to the sobering truth that life had indeed been better back in the eighties than what we are experiencing now in the present. Wish everybody in this long story had felt the same way, if only for the old times’ sake.
After Piku Mama exchanged his residential address with Arin, he returned to that old but familiar metropolitan city of Calcutta (now known as Kolkata). A city that was born on the banks of the Hooghly River. A city where Arin is from, where his extended family roots are. In that leisurely year, which went by so fast, playing cards, cricket, painting, and cycling long hours in the Sub Area and in and around the Trishul Park, Arin had temporarily built his life around Piku Mama, Mrs. Saha’s own younger brother—a rare gem and a beautiful soul that lived a polite artist’s life—who had come to stay with the Sahas at their unforgettable dormitory of longing and belonging.
Those immortalized remembrances are ever-present in the same space as they always have been: Arin’s heart. But Piku Mama (whose sojourn had been only for a year) and the lovable Saha family of three began to favour the strange comfort of normalized anonymity and controlled privacy ever since they moved to Gwalior and, a few years later, as it was heard, to the great city of Calcutta; settling down there transitioning into a slow and steady permanency while also avoiding all familiar pathways to interaction and engagement with the bygone Trishul Park days, or with what once had been so sunny an association between a school-going teenager in awe of his older friend—a great zest for life, an open heart for the world. Strange truth that all good things must come to an end, slowly but surely.
Wonder what became of the three household pets they owned so lovingly after they moved out of Trishul Park: Roxy, Mithu-pakhi, and Binky. They likely lived happily for many years, enjoying the good care the Sahas used to give their precious domesticated companions—snuggling and playing kissy-face with them while Roxy would flop down on the floor, splooting, wagging its bushy tail with great excitement; Binky nuzzling and pawing and Mithu-pakhi parroting away on the veranda. Even in those earlier days, they looked after them really well, taking them to all the places they were stationed under the Army posting orders, until the pets’ genetic life expectancy took over and they reached the end of their natural lives.
(To be continued…)
(End of part VIII)
By Arindam Moulick